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<h1 class="title" id="page-title"><small>Brothers jailed by US and
expelled to Gaza speak out</small></h1>
<div
class="field field-name-field-author field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/people/joe-catron"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel">Joe Catron</a>
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<div
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href="http://electronicintifada.net/people/electronic-intifada"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel">http://electronicintifada.net/content/brothers-jailed-us-and-expelled-gaza-speak-out/11534</a>
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<div
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typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel">Gaza City</a>
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<div
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class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime"
content="2012-07-26T23:47:00+00:00">26 July 2012</span> </div>
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<p>Basman and Bayan Elashi</p>
<span class="field-group-format group_credit credit">(<a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/people/joe-catron"
typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel">Joe Catron</a>)</span></div>
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<p>When Basman Elashi reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement
in Dallas, Texas on 9 July, he expected nothing unusual. He had visited
the federal agency regularly since his release from its custody in
March 2009.</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>At first I was
only reporting every six months,” he said over tea in his family’s Gaza
home. “Then they reduced it to three months. Then, the last time, they
asked me to report the following month.”</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>They held me
for three hours,” he said of his final visit. “I asked them why they
were holding me so long. As it turns out, they were waiting for [my
brother] Bayan to come in the afternoon. Then five people surrounded
me, told me they were deporting me, and handcuffed me. I didn’t see
Bayan until we were in the van.”</p>
<p>Unlike his brother, Bayan Elashi had been forced to wear a
monitoring anklet and report every week after his April 2009 release.
“When I reported to them on Monday, 9 July, as I always do, they
arrested me and said that I would be leaving the country within 24 to
48 hours,” he said.</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>At the
detention center, they said we had two hours to call our families to
bring us anything we needed for our deportations,” Basman said. “This
was the only window we had to call or see them.”</p>
<p>The brothers’ ordeal began much earlier, when the US government
arrested them on 18 December 2002. “The [US] government actually
indicted us on three counts: a sealed one; the second one, based on
which they arrested us; and a third one after it was finalized,” Bayan
recalled.</p>
<p>The government’s charges against the brothers stemmed from their
family and its business, the Infocom Corporation. “Bayan has a master’s
degree in computer engineering from Purdue University and worked on his
PhD degree, but never finished it,” <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/ghassan-elashi">Ghassan Elashi</a>,
a third brother and the imprisoned chairperson of the Holy Land
Foundation for Relief and Development, recounted from federal prison in
Marion, Illinois.</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>In the early
1980s, he was behind the development of the first Arabic computer,” he
said. “From then until his arrest in 2002, him, me, and my other
brothers ran a computer and Internet services company that was focused
on building personal computers and providing web hosting. Most of our
business was directed towards exporting to the Arab world.”</p>
<h2><span style="margin-left: -10px;" class="dquo">“</span>Guilt by
association”</h2>
<p>It was those dealings that would draw the government’s attention.
“The United States government used the concept of guilt by
association,” Bayan said. “There were some financial transactions
between me and [<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/hamas">Hamas</a>
political bureau deputy chairman] Mousa Abu Marzouk’s wife, who
happened to be my cousin. The government didn’t like this, and indicted
us mainly because of this relationship.” The “core issues,” he added,
related to the Holy Land Foundation and also Abu Marzouk.</p>
<p>Abu Marzouk’s status as a “specially designated terrorist” allows
the US government to criminalize his business transactions, personal
property and even family relationships, without ever charging him with
a crime or putting him on trial. It detained Abu Marzouk for 22 months
after his designation, before releasing him without charges and
deporting him to Jordan in 1997.</p>
<p>The Holy Land Foundation, once the largest Islamic charity in the
United States, was shut down with an executive order from the Bush
administration in December 2001. Ghassan Elashi and four other men
associated with the foundation were arrested and, <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-patriot-acts-tells-shocking-stories-post-911-injustice/11087">as
The Electronic Intifada reported earlier this year</a>, were “subjected
to two extraordinary trials that, amongst other court precedents,
relied on testimony from an anonymous Israeli intelligence agent. The
men were accused of providing material support to Hamas, a Palestinian
political party declared a terrorist organization by the US State
Department, by funding Islamic charitable committees in Palestine
through the Holy Land Foundation.”</p>
<p>Though they were not accused of committing or financing any violent
acts, the five are serving out decades-long prison sentences for
supporting charities that the State Department agency USAID continued
to fund long after the Holy Land Foundation men were indicted. The Holy
Land Foundation case is part of a pattern of <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/content/us-activists-face-new-repression-political-prisoners-fight-justice/9108">the
US government criminalizing Palestine advocacy and charity work</a> while
it funds the Israeli occupation and sheilds the state from
accountability.</p>
<h2>Two years of solitary confinement</h2>
<p>For their part, the Bayan and Basman Elashi experienced two years of
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/solitary-confinement">solitary
confinement</a> between their arrests and their 2004 trial. “I was only
allowed to receive visits from my immediate family visits from my wife,
my children and my mother, not my brothers or my friends,” Bayan said.</p>
<p>The brothers were convicted in October 2006, “of basically violating
a presidential executive order, which prevents US subjects from dealing
with the property of designated terrorists,” Bayan said. They received
sentences of 84 months each, and were released from prison in January
2009. At that point, the government sought to deport them.</p>
<p>But there was a catch: no country was prepared to receive them. The
brothers were not only stateless, like most Palestinians, but since
they had left the Gaza Strip before its 1967 conquest by Israel, the
Israeli-controlled population registry denied them residency rights
there as well.</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>My documents
had expired in 2002,” Basman said. “I contacted the Egyptian consulate
in Washington, DC to renew them, but they refused. Then I tried to get
a Palestinian passport, but the <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/palestinian-authority">Palestinian
Authority’s</a> delegation in DC said I didn’t qualify to have them
because I didn’t live in the occupied territories and according to the <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/oslo-accords">Oslo agreement</a>,
I was not supposed to have Palestinian documents. I asked them to put
this in writing. They asked me to fill out an application for a
document and promised they would send me a letter of denial.”</p>
<p>The Bureau of Prisons turned the brothers over to Immigration and
Customs Enforcement while the latter scrambled to figure out what to do
with them. Eventually, it released each from its detention centers to
their families in Dallas: Basman in March 2009, and Bayan in April 2010.</p>
<h2>Shock of deportation</h2>
<p>Then came their deportations. “Since everyone knew who they were,
everyone was shocked,” Nida Abu-Baker, a Palestinian-American art
student in Dallas and daughter of imprisoned Holy Land Foundation
co-founder Shukri Abu-Baker, said of the news.</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>I was very
surprised,” she added. “My whole family was. My oldest sister just saw
Uncle Basman just a day or two before he got deported. They shouldn’t
have had been deported because the judge agreed on them being allowed
to stay here, and plus they had finished serving time in prison. It was
sad.”</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>I was deported
using an expired travel document from Dallas, to JFK [airport] in New
York, to Cairo, accompanied by four agents,” Basman said. “At the
airport, we were received by two men from the US consulate. One was an
American; the other looked like an Egyptian. They talked privately,
with us on the side. Then we were taken to the police station at the
airport.</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>We were called
in separately to talk to an Egyptian agent who asked us questions: what
the indictment was for; what the charges were; how long we were in the
US. Then they asked me about my Palestinian documents and if I had a <em>hawiyye</em>
[Israel-issued Palestinian residency permit]. My answer was that my
passport had expired and I didn’t have a <em>hawiyye</em>. The last
time I had been in Gaza was before the 1967 war.”</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>The actions of
DHS and ICE are alarming, troubling and intolerable,” American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) Legal Director Abed Ayoub <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/maureen-clare-murphy/stateless-palestinians-face-indefinite-detention-cairo-airport-after">said
of the deportations in a statement</a>. “ADC has demanded, and will
continue to demand, a clear explanation as to why these brothers were
deported. The US government is very well aware of the deplorable living
conditions in Gaza resulting from an <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/tags/gaza-siege">illegal blockade</a>.”</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>The most
important thing we need people to know is that the US government has a
certain view of Middle East policy,” Bayan said. “If anybody has an
opinion opposing this policy, the government will use its legal system
against them. The courts will yield to the government’s wishes and
overlook, and even violate, all the legal and constitutional rights of
the individual. They’ll hand him a harsh sentence just to please the
government, knowing, without a doubt, that he didn’t violate US law.”</p>
<p><span style="margin-left: -5px;" class="dquo">“</span>Especially if
that person is a Muslim or an Arab or a Palestinian or from Gaza,” he
added.</p>
<p><em>Joe Catron is a US activist in Gaza, Palestine. He works with
the <a href="http://cpds.ps/eng/index-index.html">Centre for Political
and Development Studies</a> (CPDS) and other Palestinian groups and
international solidarity networks, particularly in support of the
boycott, divestment and sanctions and prisoners’ movements. He blogs at
<a href="http://joecatron.wordpress.com/">joecatron.wordpress.com</a>
and tweets at <a href="http://twitter.com/jncatron">@jncatron</a>.</em></p>
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